Elvis and Dune established him as a chameleonic movie star. Now, with The Bikeriders, something closer to the real Butler is being revealed.
There’s a scene early on in the new film The Bikeriders that functions like a stress test for stardom.
While drinking at a 1960s pool hall, a woman named Kathy (Jodie Comer) is unnerved by the menacing bikers in the room and grabs her purse to go. She’s only stopped dead in her tracks when she catches sight of Benny, another biker, alone. The young man’s muscles are rippling, his hair artfully mussed, his gaze troubled but beguiling. As Kathy stares at him from across the crowded room, the jukebox music and biker chatter fade away, and all you can hear is her stunned gasp as she realises she’s fallen in love.
No visual effects are required for this scene, just a man who can hold the screen and make a woman hold her breath. It’s the sort of role you might have filled in past decades with the likes of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman or Brad Pitt. But who from today’s cohort of young stars has their presence?
That’s what worried director Jeff Nichols two years ago as he embarked on casting the character. He had written Benny as someone who feels mythic even to his fellow bikers, but no contemporary actor was even close to coming to mind. So Nichols wasn’t expecting much when he met with Austin Butler, whose breakthrough film Elvis was, at that point, still months from release.
What he found, even as Butler walked up, was someone who looked and felt exactly like the character he had written, someone with beauty, gravitas and easy masculinity.
Or, as Nichols put it, “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m talking to a movie star.’”
The last two years have more than borne out that first impression. Butler’s performance as the king of rock ‘n’ roll in Elvis turbocharged his career and earned him an Oscar nomination, while the March release of Dune: Part Two, in which he played the alabaster and smoothly evil Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, confirmed that the 32-year-old actor was no one-hit wonder.
In addition to starring in the Apple TV+ limited series Masters of the Air, Butler has become a magnet for prestige directors: He recently filmed Ari Aster’s Eddington, is about to star in Darren Aronofsky’s crime thriller Caught Stealing, and has long been rumoured for Michael Mann’s still-gestating Heat 2.
“Right now, that guy’s at the top and he’s getting every script,” Nichols said. “We’re going to learn a lot about him by the choices that he makes.”
Now would be the ideal time. Since Elvis, Butler has played such wildly different people that you’d be forgiven for not knowing who he really is, even though that’s typically key to the whole movie-star thing. Either you’re eager to see them play versions of themselves over and over, or you’re dying to see just how far away they can get away from their essence.
That Butler feels accomplished but not yet typecast could be considered a feat. Handsome movie stars can spend their whole careers trying to prove they are more than meets the eye — that they’re capable of real acting and should be considered for character parts, too. In a stroke of good fortune, Butler is navigating that arc in reverse: After establishing himself with two high-profile, full-transformation character roles, he’s only just now getting to the handsome movie-star bit.
With The Bikeriders, something closer to the real Butler is finally being revealed, though Nichols suggested that I was wondering the wrong thing. Instead of questioning who Butler really is, it’s much more fruitful to ponder who he’s going to be.
“We’re watching a person create the persona of a movie star, which I find kind of fascinating,” he said.
It was the last day of May, and Butler was leading me down a trail in Coldwater Canyon outside Los Angeles, not far from his house. “Thank you for doing this outside,” he said, his voice rumbling, as we made our way to a deserted open-air amphitheatre. “I’ve been locked in, doing press inside for a week.”
Butler wore a pale blue button-up the same colour as his striking eyes and a vintage baseball cap touting the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a subtle reminder of the film he was promoting. As we found a place to sit and made small talk, he listened like a devoted scene partner, holding eye contact and affirming things I said with a murmured “wow,” “yeah” or “interesting.”
He explained that this connected gaze, which he learned in an acting class, helped him conquer a once-crippling shyness. “If every time I feel attention on me, I start to feel like I’m imploding, then I just need to put my curiosity onto the other person,” he said.
The people who’ve worked with Butler tend to mention that curiosity. They also describe him as “thoughtful” and “kind” as if they can hardly believe that a famous young actor would be either of those things. I mentioned that to him.
“Wow. Wow. Interesting,” he said.
Butler gives good brood but is not inherently brooding. He does not stumble out of nightclubs or refuse to leave his trailer in the morning. Although he lacks the whiff of danger that used to make bad-boy movie stars so alluring, that could be considered a good thing in our current, more cautious era. Eventually, danger curdles.
“I’ve seen every different way of being on a set,” said Butler, who grew up in Southern California and started acting as a teenager in shows for Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Still, his steadiness is not simply a reaction to bad behaviour he’s witnessed; instead, it’s something more innate. “I owe a lot of it to my parents and the things that they instilled in me from being a child: Treat everybody how you want to be treated, regardless of if they can do something for you,” he said.
Butler’s father and grandfather were both motorcyclists, and he remembers sitting on the back of his dad’s bike as they went on long rides together. When he was 7, his parents divorced, and at 15, his father told him he was old enough to ride on his own. Still, it would have to be their secret: Butler’s mother forbade him from riding after his older sister got into a motorcycle accident that dislocated her shoulder.
Butler drew on all that and more to play Benny, whose loyalties to Kathy and to his motorcycle gang are often at odds. He also saw the part of himself that always has one foot out of the covers. As an actor, Butler is forced to be peripatetic, creating temporary but tight-knit circles in far-off places. “Then you finish the job and the family breaks up, and you go to another one,” he said. “In therapy one day, I realized that pattern reminds me so much of my parents’ divorce.”
Nichols said that connection helped deepen a character who was originally written as dead inside.
“There’s some complexity in him that honestly changed my calculus as we were making the film,” Nichols said. “It’s not that he’s emotionally cut off, it’s that he chooses to be emotionally unavailable to people, but he’s got a lot of emotion going on. That’s a vastly better character, and it is a direct result of the human being Austin Butler is.”
Once upon a time, we wanted to know everything about movie stars: who they were dating, why they were fighting, if they had married, when they had split. But in an era where social media allows just about anybody to offer their lives up for public consumption, the natural inclination among our new set of movie stars is to pull back, to post rarely, to cultivate mystique.
There is no new Julia Roberts, whose romances played out in public view, or Brangelina, whose portmanteau kept Us Weekly in business. Although Margot Robbie headlined last year’s biggest movie, how many Barbie viewers even know that she’s married, or to who? There are exceptions, like Timothée Chalamet’s high-profile relationship with Kylie Jenner or the Marvel-minted union of Spider-Man stars Tom Holland and Zendaya. But even those megastars keep their romances as private as possible, rarely showing up to the same events arm in arm.
Since 2021, Butler has been dating model-actress Kaia Gerber, who is Cindy Crawford’s daughter and was previously in a relationship with actor Jacob Elordi, of Euphoria and Priscilla. Twenty years ago, the tabloids would have made hay with all this: Imagine the love triangle that could be ginned up with a famous beauty and two movie stars who both played Elvis Presley! But by and large, the press and public have taken a hands-off approach to Butler’s personal life.
It’s not that Butler is private, per se: As we sat together, he chatted freely about his family, his feelings, his fears and his dog. He just doesn’t want any of what you’re reading about him to interfere with how you might see Benny.
“I’m trying to decide how much I want to give away of my own internal thoughts,” he said. “I don’t want to impose upon anybody watching the film what is going on, because I want to allow them to project upon him.”
Everybody wants to know about the voice. If there’s one thing people gleaned from Butler’s monthslong Elvis press tour, it’s that he couldn’t shake the drawl, suggesting that all those years of prep had a permanent effect on his persona.
“It’d be strange, I think, if it didn’t change me,” Butler said.
For the record, though he has shed Presley’s Memphis twang, his voice remains deeper and more interesting than it was at the beginning of his career, when the roles required more Disney pep in his step. But whether it’s a leftover affectation from Elvis or just a natural maturing, who’d begrudge Butler for sticking with something that works? One day, Ryan Gosling decided to leave his Mickey Mouse Club shtick behind and start talking like Robert De Niro, and everybody agreed to just go with it.
At the very least, it’s a reminder that Butler has the sort of facility for accents that you rarely find in American leading men. (Normally, you’d have to import a Brit for that.) When he was cast in Dune, everyone expected him to use something close to his normal voice until he showed up on set sounded unnervingly like Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, who played his character’s uncle. That willingness to go the extra mile for a role is what keeps Butler hooked.
“I love the feeling of obsession, that addictive feeling of passion,” he said. “When you finish it and the process isn’t there anymore, that’s where I’ve felt sadness. You kind of don’t know what to do with yourself.”
For a moment, Butler looked mournful. “He has that quality of somebody that’s maybe searching for a big brother,” Nichols would tell me later. “You want to take care of him. You want to put your arm around him and be like, ‘I got you.’”
When Elvis wrapped, Butler was so spent that he went directly to the emergency room and was bedridden for a week. He then flew to England to begin shooting Masters of the Air. As a child, the slightest change threw him, but as a working actor, he’s had to get used to the whiplash.
As he continues into his 30s, he’s hoping for more consistency with the people in his life. “Suddenly, it feels so much easier to say no,” he said, “and not feel such a need to mould myself into what I think other people want.” But at the same time, he feels he’d be remiss not to take advantage of the moment he’s been aiming at his whole career.
“It’s not lost on me how fortunate I am,” he said. “In my early 20s, there were roles that I wanted to get that I didn’t, and there were types of performances that I wanted to be able to bring to life that I wasn’t, and that caused me to then seek out teachers and to try to figure out how to get better in whatever way I could. It was very humbling for a long time.”
Butler knows who he wants to be, and right now, Hollywood needs what he wants to be. But in our current era, is there still a place for the primacy of movie stars?
“Can we have Paul Newman? Can we have Brad Pitt?” Nichols wondered aloud. “Yeah, I think we can, and I think they’re going to prove to be just as valuable today as they were then.” Still, the Bikeriders director copped to his own bias: “I love movies more than TV shows, and they need to be populated by movie stars. So you’re speaking to a guy who is cheering for this side of things.”
When I pressed Nichols over whether young people had that same attachment, he admitted he wasn’t sure but told me about a moment during the film’s USO tour when Butler came onstage to introduce The Bikeriders to a packed theatre, and the base commander asked him to pose for a picture with the crowd.
“These young women could not control themselves,” Nichols said. “I mean, you have a base commander being like, ‘Ladies, please sit down,’ and they could not control themselves to the point to where we were like, ‘We’ve kind of got to get out of here.’”
It reminded Nichols of the way things felt when Butler filmed the pool-hall scene, which culminates in a moment where Benny comes over to Kathy’s table and barely speaks: Instead, he gazes dreamily at her in a way that’s utterly disarming. Is his gaze a confident act of seduction or the kind of plaintive look a little boy might give his mother? Who knows, who cares, it’s working.
“In the moment, watching it on a monitor, it felt iconic,” Nichols said. “It feels odd saying that because I don’t want to pat myself on the back for my own movie, but it’s because they’re movie stars, man. They’re not like normal people.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Adali Schell
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
